What happened to me after that? What took away the peace in those eyes? Who took it away? The person who shot this picture?
With a long exhalation of relief, I drop the album. It falls beside the rotten prunes on the wire. There’s something revolting about keeping food stuffed in a bag beneath a floor. The prunes have an especially nasty look, as though they were being saved for some reason beyond the ken of normal human beings. A necklace, maybe, like something a peasant would use to ward off vampires.
“Miss Catherine? That you over there?”
A black man in grease-stained khaki work clothes has appeared among the trees. It’s Mose, the yardman. After so many years at Malmaison, he moves among these trees like a ghost. He and Daddy must have run into each other many times on their solitary forays under the canopy of oaks.
“It’s me, Mose.”
“You all right? You fall down or something?”
“I’m just resting.”
He moves closer, but his advance is solicitous, the way Pearlie moves around houseguests who don’t know her. Mose can’t be much younger than my grandfather, and time has worn him down to a bent nub, like a tree that finally gives way to decades of wind and bugs and rain. The scleras of his eyes are yellow, and gray stubble grows high up his cheeks. It’s hard to imagine that I once saw this man carry railroad ties across his shoulders.
“What you got there?” Mose asks. “You drawing pictures?”
He’s noticed the sketchbook, the one artifact of the bag that I haven’t yet examined. “I’m just looking at some old pictures my father took.”
He nods agreeably, but then his eyes focus on something else. “What’s that there?”
He’s pointing at the prunes. “Some kind of rotten food. I think it’s prunes.”
Mose bends and picks up the string of blackened fruit. He studies one, pinches it between his fingers, then brings it to his nose and sniffs it.
“Mose, you’re a braver man than I.”
He laughs. “You ain’t no man. You a girl.”
I always wondered if Mose was simpleminded, but I’ve never known for sure.
“These ain’t prunes.” He places one of the blackened things between his front teeth and bites down, testing its texture. “This here be hide.”
“Hide?”
“Skin. Some kind of animal skin. Chunks of something.”
“Some kind of hunting trophy, maybe?”
Mose shrugs. “Something like that, I reckon.”
As he hands me the necklace, the words of the grizzled vet from the Vietnam Veterans Building come back to me: A lot of Hollywood movies don’t show nothing but grunts cutting off ears and killing women and kids. And some of that happened, I won’t lie….
I stuff the necklace quickly into the bag, nausea rolling through my stomach.
“Miss Catherine? You sure you all right?”
I nod and begin gathering the rest of my father’s things. Far behind Mose, I see Michael’s Expedition carefully negotiating its way through the trees.
“Do you know anything about DeSalle Island, Mose?”
His face wrinkles in thought. “Not no more, I don’t.”
“But you did?”
“Well, I was born down there, wasn’t I?”
A current of excitement goes through me. “You were born on the island?”
“Sho was. I think everybody who ever worked up here for your family was born on the island. Dr. Kirkland always saying nobody knows how to work no more. He ’bout right, too. He say people from the island still do a day’s work for a day’s pay.”
Poverty wages, probably. “Do you like my grandfather, Mose?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am. Dr. Kirkland been real good to me.”
“I think you know what I mean.”
Mose looks around as though someone might be eavesdropping. “You know your granddaddy, Miss Catherine. He a tough man, and he know how to squeeze a nickel till the buffalo shits—pardon my language.”
I say nothing, leaving a vacuum that Mose feels compelled to fill.
“Dr. Kirkland be kind of like that story I heard a long time ago. The plantation owner gives a slave a pint of whiskey. Another slave asks how he liked it, and the first slave says, ‘Well, if it’d been any better, he wouldn’t have give it to me, and if it’d been any worse, I couldn’t have drunk it.”
Mose isn’t simpleminded at all.
“Dr. Kirkland takes care of the people on the island, though,” he adds quickly. “They better off than a lot of black folks here in town.”
“What about my father, Mose?”
He looks confused for a minute. “Mr. Luke, you mean?”
“Yes.”
He smiles broadly, revealing tobacco-stained teeth. “Mr. Luke always had a good word for me when he passed. Sometimes he gave me a smoke off whatever he was smoking, too. If you know what I mean.”
“I do.”
“I liked ol’ Luke, but I had to be careful around him. Dr. Kirkland didn’t like him none at all.”
Michael’s Expedition is close now, threading its way through the trees like a tank wary of land mines. “Did you like the island, Mose?”
He shrugs. “Didn’t know nothing else back then. I wouldn’t go back now, though. I like my TV in the evenings. And I don’t like that river. Too many people done died in that water.”
“Did you know somebody who drowned?”
“I had a cousin drown in it. Sho did.”
“Girl or boy?”
“Boy. Name of Enos. But I believe a little girl drowned some years before that, too.”
“Do you think the island is a bad place?”
Mose squints at me as though trying to make out something far away. “What you mean, Miss Catherine?”
“Is there something bad there? Something you might not be able to explain, but that you just feel? I used to feel something like that there.”
The yardman closes his eyes. After a moment, a little shudder goes through him. Then he opens his eyes and looks at me like a little boy. “When I was young, the old folks used to say killers from the prison roamed the roads at night. From Angola, you know? Like they’d slip out of the prison at night, float over to the island, and walk the roads looking for children. All that seems like a fairy story now, something they used to scare us. But still, a lot of kids wouldn’t get near them roads anytime round dark, and not even in the daytime by themselves.”
“Why not?”
He shrugs again. “That’s just how it was. You’d have to ask somebody else the why of it. But I’ll tell you this…I got me a lot of kin down there, and I hardly been back there in forty years. And now that you ask me, I don’t care if I never go back again.”
As Michael’s Expedition rumbles up beside Mose, the yardman gives me a wave and ambles off through the trees. By the time Michael rolls down his window, Mose has vanished. Like my father, he is another ghost of Malmaison.
I take up Luke Ferry’s bag of secrets and climb into the SUV.
Chapter
50
Michael Wells and I are sitting on a leather couch in the private office of Dr. Tom Cage, a general practitioner in Natchez for more than forty years. Bookshelves line all four walls, some stuffed with medical treatises, others with histories of the Civil War. There’s a stack of medical charts a foot high on Dr. Cage’s desk, the bane of every physician. A half-painted lead soldier holding a musket stands in the shadow of the charts, a bottle of gray paint beside him. Like us, he seems to be waiting for the doctor to appear.
But what holds my attention now, what I’ve hardly been able to take my eyes off since arriving, is the polished white skull being used as a bookend in the shelf behind Dr. Cage’s desk. The empty eye sockets stare at me with what looks like mockery, reminding me yet again that Nathan Malik is dead, that the murders in New Orleans remain unsolved, and that I am still a suspect.
Since finding the Polaroids of the naked children in my father’s bag, I’ve been unable t
o think clearly. The voices that tormented me long ago have returned, a susurrant undercurrent of vicious commentary that I cannot silence. More disturbing, something deep within me seems to have cracked, leaving me broken in a way I cannot begin to mend. What is broken, I think, is my faith—my desperate hope that despite what Grandpapa told me, my father could not have done such terrible things to me.
But pictures don’t lie.
Michael has done all he can to ease my anxiety. Though he believes it would be a mistake to exhume my father’s body, he telephoned his attorney during the drive over and asked what was required to accomplish such a thing. There’s no law in Mississippi governing the exhumation of bodies; in fact, not even a permit is required. What is required is the presence of a funeral director as a witness. However, when Michael phoned the funeral director, he was told that the funeral home would oversee no exhumation without a court order. Michael’s lawyer believes such an order can be obtained from the chancery judge ex parte—without a hearing—but to do so will require an affidavit stating the reason for the exhumation from the decedent’s next of kin.
My mother.
“Hi, Michael. Sorry to keep you two waiting.” A tall man with white hair and a white beard marches into the room and pumps Michael’s hand. Then he turns to me and smiles. “So, you’re Catherine Ferry?”
I stand and offer Dr. Cage my hand. “Please call me Cat.”
He takes it and squeezes softly with arthritic fingers. “And I’m Tom.”
He moves behind his desk and takes a seat. A big cigar and several tongue depressors protrude from his white lab coat, and a red stethoscope hangs around his neck. It’s clear that Tom Cage practices the kind of medicine my grandfather hasn’t deigned to practice in many years.
Dr. Cage takes a Diet Coke from a minifridge behind his desk, pops it open, and takes a long pull from the can. After a long exhalation of satisfaction, he sets the can on the desk and fixes his eyes on me.
“Luke Ferry. What do you want to know?”
“I’m not sure. Everything you remember, I suppose.”
“That’s a lot. I treated Luke as a boy, treated his parents before they died, and I treated the uncle who raised him off and on. What are you most interested in?”
I look at the floor where my father’s green bag rests between my feet. “Vietnam,” I say softly. “The White Tigers.”
Dr. Cage’s eyes flicker. “You already know more than I thought you would. Cat…your father learned to shoot to put food on his family’s table. He shot better as a boy than most men could after a lifetime of practice. But in the war they made him use that talent for another purpose. They made him a sniper. Luke had mixed feelings about that job. On one hand, he was proud of his professionalism.” Dr. Cage gestures at his bookshelves. “As you can see, I’m a military history buff. I also served in Korea. Did you know that in Vietnam, the average number of rounds expended per dead enemy soldier was fifty thousand?”
“Fifty thousand!” Michael says beside me. “That can’t be right.”
“It is,” says Dr. Cage. “That’s one reason we lost that war. You want to guess how many rounds were expended by army and marine snipers during Vietnam per dead enemy soldier?”
Michael shakes his head. “One?”
“One point three nine. Those boys were very good at their job. But that kind of killing is much more difficult than returning fire at a man who’s trying to kill you. It’s done in cold blood, looking through a scope at a man ten times life-size. You watch him smoke a cigarette or take a piss, and then you blow his head into ragged chunks of gore and bone. Think of John Kennedy’s head exploding in the Zapruder film. That’s what you see every time you shoot. Once you have pictures like that in your head, they never go away.”
Dr. Cage takes another sip of Diet Coke. “My point is, Luke was under great stress even before he was pressed into the White Tigers. And in that unit, things changed for the worse, and damn quick.
“The Tigers were essentially a terror unit, sent into Cambodia to harry and kill NVA forces hiding in a neutral country. These were covert operations carried out behind the lines, under the command of officers who had cast aside the rules of organized warfare. They took few prisoners. When they did, it was to torture them. Rape was used both as an intimidation tactic against the local populace, and also as a reward for the troops. They rarely distinguished between soldiers and noncombatants. Almost everyone they encountered was considered a target.
“When Luke protested against extreme acts of cruelty, he was ridiculed by his fellow soldiers and looked on with suspicion by his superiors. He soon learned that if he failed to go along with the prevailing authority, he’d wind up as dead as the rest of the people who came in contact with the White Tigers.”
While Dr. Cage pauses to think, I rummage through the bag until I find the wire string of “rotten prunes.” Fighting my revulsion, I hold the string out to the doctor.
“Do you know what this is?”
Dr. Cage takes the string from my hands and lays it on his desk. With a magnifying glass from his pocket, he examines one of the blackened chunks.
“Ears,” he says.
“What?” asks Michael.
Dr. Cage looks up at us. “It’s an ear necklace. Never seen one. Where did you get it?”
“Daddy kept it hidden in a bag with some other things.”
“It’s a war trophy. When some soldiers killed an enemy in Vietnam, they cut off one or both ears and strung them on a necklace, much like Indians taking scalps.”
“I’ve heard of that,” says Michael. “But I guess it never seems real until…”
Dr. Cage shrugs. “They did it with foreskins, too, but that’s nothing new. They were taking foreskins as trophies back in the Crusades. War has always been barbaric. Only the tools have changed.”
It’s hard for me to visualize the father I knew living in the world Tom Cage is describing. “So, my father cut the ears off his victims?”
“Victim isn’t the proper word during wartime,” Dr. Cage says, “though it may be fitting in cases like this. But it’s difficult for me to imagine Luke Ferry stooping to mutilation. There aren’t more than twenty ears on this necklace, and Luke had thirty-six confirmed kills as a sniper alone. He probably killed many more without a spotter present to make it official. No, I’d be very surprised if this necklace belonged to Luke.”
“Why?” asks Michael. “Given all that you’ve told us?”
“Because Luke risked his life to bring the men who’d done this kind of thing to justice. As soon as he got back to Vietnam from Cambodia, he went over the head of his CO and reported what he’d seen. Higher authority did exactly what they always do when someone ignores the chain of command. Within a week, Luke was back in action with the White Tigers. That’s when he was wounded—according to Luke, by his fellow soldiers. It’s a miracle he got aboard a medevac chopper alive. He said that if it hadn’t been for one man, he’d have been left to bleed to death in a rice paddy.”
“What happened to him after that?”
“He was never the same. The things he’d witnessed had pushed him beyond his limit. When he learned they were going to send him back to the Tigers again, he lost it. He started yelling about everything he’d seen, and the next thing you know, they were processing him out on some kind of special discharge. They didn’t give him a section eight, but it amounted to the same thing. His post-traumatic stress disorder kicked in even before he made it back to the States. I could tell you about that, but something tells me that’s not what you’re really here for.”
Michael was right: Tom Cage is a perceptive man.
“Go ahead,” Michael says. “Tell him.”
“What do you know about childhood sexual abuse?” I ask.
Dr. Cage looks surprised. “I’ve seen some in my time. I haven’t treated children for years, but in the beginning I did. Treated anybody who walked through the front door.” He takes a sip of Diet Coke and looks over at his
bookshelves. “My fear is that I’ve seen a lot more sexual abuse than I realized at the time. That there were kids I could have helped if I’d only had more courage, or better eyes to see.”
“Why more courage?” I ask.
“I think we see what we want to see. Or maybe what we can afford to see. When I started practice here, there was no such thing as Child Protective Services. Just the welfare department. And in those days, men had virtually absolute control over their families.” Dr. Cage’s eyes have focused somewhere in the middle distance. He might as well be alone in the room. I’m about to clear my throat when he snaps out of it and looks up at me. “I was thinking of some particular cases. Particular children. But that was a long time ago. I hope they turned out all right.”
There’s an uncomfortable silence that no one seems inclined to break. For some reason, I feel I can trust this man. Reaching into the bag, I remove the three Polaroid snapshots and pass them across the desk. “I found these in the bag with the other stuff that Daddy kept secret.”
Dr. Cage takes a long look at each Polaroid, then looks up at me. “What’s really going on here, Cat? What are you trying to figure out?”
“I think my father may have molested me.”
“Do you have some reason other than these pictures to believe that?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.” He glances at the snapshots again. “These pictures look like damning evidence, I know. But taken by themselves, they’re like the ear necklace. Merely possessing them seems like evidence of perversion, but you don’t know the circumstances by which Luke came to have them.”
“Why would he hide them if he had nothing to be ashamed of?”
Dr. Cage shrugs. “We may never know that. Have you gone through everything in that bag?”
“Everything but this,” I reply, holding up the sketchbook.
“Why did you pass over that?”
“I don’t know.” An image of Louise Butler comes into my mind. “Someone already told me what was in it. Sketches of DeSalle Island, stuff like that.”
“Do you mind if I take a look?”
I pass the sketchbook across the desk, and he begins flipping through it.